“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”

The conservative "anti-discrimination" movement is probably the most successful and pernicious example of political equivocation in recent history.

There's no discrimination on the basis of race if there's no discrimination on the basis of race.

I am the small cat if I am the small cat.

http://realityshifters.com/media/matrixspoon.jpg

yay, back to segregated schools by race AND by class!

"lolz liberals are the real racists amirite" -- Chief Justice John Roberts

i think the reason behind this decision is that government can't stop people from being racist

and government has been making incremental changes for a while now, and they think they have reached a spot where any return on new legislation would be negligible

yay, back to segregated schools by race AND by class!

Well but on a practical level, cities like Louisville and Seattle will probably just switch to doing school assignments based on class, or based on neighborhood zones that wind up drawn around racial groups. It's a relief that there are alternate ways to get the same results, because the intent of (e.g.) the Louisville system was really simple and admirable: in a city with a sizeable black population, there would not be schools that approached being all-white or all-black.

That Roberts quote bugs all hell out of me, but it's probably not worth going into why. I think I've reached a point where ... so long as there are simple alternate ways of getting the same integration results, I'm becoming fine with race not being acknowledged as a factor, because the resentment it sparks is astounding and kind of long-term dangerous. Much of it is resentment among people who are assholes or just plain wrong, but I'm beginning to see more value in just not even giving them the excuse.

It's reassuring that the school choice systems in question here seemed to be fairly popular in those cities, systems that worked decently as compromises among all the communities involved -- hopefully this means they'll be dedicated to the same results even if they have to approach it from different directions.

Why Are American Schools Still Segregated?

A new study offers two answers: White people are making up a smaller percentage of the population than they used to, and different races are living in different school districts.